November-December Holidays, 2020

In 2020, the holidays went by in a blur. We were grateful that we were able to spend them with family, Pop pop and Grandma, and that we were all together at least.

 

THANKSGIVING

The girls decorated fall-looking leaf cookies, and we delivered some of those, along with an apple cobbler and a pumpkin bread and lots of cards and drawings, to an apartment full of international grad students living in Roxbury and feeling rather isolated on Thanksgiving Eve.

Helen and I went by bike to the farmer's market to pick up our turkey, like every year.

Someone from a nearby building shot a picture of the parking lot in our spaced-out line; we happened to be right in between the two giant poles in the middle. My new back rack and saddlebags came in handy for bringing home Thanksgiving greens and berries for the table centerpiece.

We got a delivery of wild mushrooms from our "mushroom guy," and then I roasted them up with some fresh dill to have on Thanksgiving.

The day after Thanksgiving, we had a friendsgiving gathering with Sarah and Meg's families in Meg's backyard, and Samantha led the little girls in some crafts.

 

 

CHANUKAH

With no Chanukah party this year, we contented ourselves with making cookies, making latkes (and latke pizzas, and latke eggs benedict, and other delights) and playing dreidel ourselves.

 

 

CHRISTMAS

Our Christmas cookie-making started before Thanksgiving and continued relatively late. Samantha made a lot of different Christmas crafts and ornaments, some of which we mailed to her Sunday School and piano teachers, etc., along with handmade cards, beautiful Ashley Bryan-decorated chocolate bars that donate to Black Lives Matter, and some little glass magnets she made with snippets of a piece of music she composed under the glass. We delivered packages of Christmas cookies to all the older women and all the families with kids on our block, and on Christmas Eve Robert took the girls on the back of his bike and delivered crocheted hats, cookies, breads, and other treats to friends who lived elsewhere in J.P.; it helped that the day was warm and balmy (for New England in December--no jackets for the kids) and that the snow we got five days before Christmas was rapidly melting.

Also on Christmas Eve I made up a hundred individual baggies of holiday cookies, with a hand-colored note from the girls, and we delivered them to the SRO on the corner

A week before Christmas, we put up our rainbow Christmas tree again, which the girls adore.

The kids participated in an Advent craft night with the church (over Zoom) one evening, and assembled the Lego Christmas village and train set (which we add a piece to each year) around the tree on another evening.

Another day, they decorated a gingerbread house, and Helen made Christmas present necklaces for some of her dolls (including this chocolate-tin bear a friend of mine dropped by as a gift). On Christmas Eve (during a surprise power outage that affected our entire block) we finished cooking lamb chops with the oven's residual heat and then opened a box of international Christmas snacks and enjoyed them by lantern light.

Christmas Day was also balmy, though it rained some; the girls loved their "sister necklaces" that Samantha made them, and the matching dresses I got them, and they spent part of the morning cuddled up on the back porch reading and talking. We took a walk in the rain up the block with my new umbrella at one point as well.

Appetizers ("pickies"), dinner (ham from our farmers again), and a Netflix Christmas movie rounded out the afternoon.

Over Christmas weekend, Samantha took a holiday sketching class (over Zoom) while Helen followed some YouTube drawing tutorials to draw nutcrackers (she's a little obsessed with the ballet).

One evening Robert drove everyone around admiring Christmas lights, and we came home to homemade hot cocoa bombs and a wintery puzzle.

 

NEW YEAR'S

We spent the afternoon of New Year's Eve at my parents' house, eating Jewish deli sandwiches and pickles. When we went home, Marcus stayed up playing with friends, so he was up at midnight and came down to watch the ball drop with us and to eat tinned fish with Robert. 2021 is here, and we hope it'll be a different kind of year, for sure.

 

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Created: 1/19/21. Last Modified: 1/21/21.